The purpose of this book is to provide an integrative framework to students who are learning to use microcomputers and their related software and systems to solve business-related problems. Frequently, students are taught a particular software program or package as the focus of this training. Thus, their perspective becomes one of interpreting problems and solutions in terms of that particular software. This has several pitfalls. First, the students are limited in scope to only the present and institutionally available software. Second, they fall victim to the law of instruments. This leads to overemphasis of the software usage. And third the software-bound approach often prevents the students from focusing on the problem to be solved that is analyzing the problem and seeking an optimal solution path which may or may not involve using the computer and the specific software.